“But you’d like to.”
If not for his crooked and oh-so-confident smile, she couldn’t have answered. As it was, she merely shrugged, then repeated her comment. “You think my father committed a crime.”
“I think the people who sent Charley Baker to jail have something to hide. A mistake, misconduct, malfeasance…I don’t know. But I want to know, and Charley needs to.” He paused before quietly asking, “Don’t you need to know, too?”
She did. These…she wouldn’t call them doubts; she believed in her father, believed there was a logical explanation for everything. But these questions, as long as they remained unanswered, would drive a wedge between them. She would always wonder what he and his friends were hiding. She would always wonder whether he’d prosecuted an innocent man.
She would always wonder whether she knew him at all.
The only answer she could allow herself without feeling disloyal to the senator was a nod. She did need to know.
“We don’t have to be adversaries,” Jake said.
Her smile was mirthless. “You want to prove my father guilty. I want to prove him innocent. I can’t think of much that would be more adversarial than that.”
“I’m not trying to prove anything, Kylie. I want the truth, plain and simple. Work with me. Help me get it. And if it proves your father’s innocence, great.”
Work with him. Spend more time with him. Almost certainly have sex with him. And, along the way, prove that the senator did nothing wrong…or that he did. Could she handle that? Could she bear knowing that the man she’d loved and admired and respected all her life wasn’t the hero she believed him to be?
Maybe. But she knew one thing for sure: she couldn’t bear not knowing.
“All right.” Her voice sounded hollow. She didn’t want to do this. She really did want to go back to the pre-Jake status quo, when she’d been blissfully ignorant of the Charley Baker case. But there was no going back. She’d learned that when her mother died.
They finished eating. She’d expected her appetite to vanish, but the opposite happened. Must be all those butterflies in her stomach that needed nourishment, too.
“Want that drink now?” Jake asked as he signaled the waitress.
“No, thanks. I never had the chance to become much of a drinker…or a smoker or a rebel or anything else.”
“Always had that reputation to consider. Did you ever wish your father had stayed just a lawyer or just a district attorney?”
“It would have been easier for me,” she admitted. “But politics is his passion. My mother understood that and she made sure I understood it before I started kindergarten.”
“No misbehaving in school, no wild parties, no experimenting with drugs and alcohol, no grand affairs, no making a spectacle of yourself.”
She smiled at the very notion. “I wouldn’t have done any of those things if my father hadn’t been in politics. I live a very dull life.”
He didn’t smile back. “You would have had time to grieve for your mother in private.”
Kylie watched as the waitress delivered the check, Jake’s words from their first meeting—God, had it been only yesterday?—echoing in her head. He had his fifteen-year-old daughter out on the campaign trail with him only a week after her mother died…
“That was my choice,” she said as he pulled a twenty from his wallet. “I asked to travel with him.”
“Bullshit.”
“No, really—”
“Why did you ask?” He waited, but when she didn’t answer, he went on. “Because he wasn’t going to let a little thing like his wife dying interfere with his reelection. Because he didn’t cancel one damn appearance. Because if you wanted to spend any time with him rather than being left home alone with your grief and your housekeeper, you had to go with him.”
“It’s not as if it was a great deal of travel,” she protested. “He’s just a state senator, after all. He was just doing speeches, interviews, town-hall meetings, shaking hands.” And pulling her onstage and in front of the TV cameras with him. All she’d wanted was a bit of his attention, to hang around backstage with his aides until he had time for her. She hadn’t wanted him to—to take advantage of her.
Jake was shaking his head in disgust. “His wife had died. His only child had lost her mother, and he couldn’t spare a little time out of the limelight to help her deal with it. You deserved better than that, Kylie.”
What she deserved, what was best for her, had never been a consideration in the Riordan household. It was all about the senator. Always had been, always would be. She’d never known any other way. It touched her that someone saw it differently.
Be honest, she admonished herself. It touched her that Jake saw it differently.
The waitress returned to pick up the tab. “Keep the change,” Jake said, then drained the last of his beer. “Ready?”
Not really. She would have liked to sit a while, to listen to the music and maybe even dance a dance or two. But she slid her purse strap over her shoulder and stood up.
No one paid them any attention as they crossed the bar to the door. Outside, the sun had settled below the horizon, and the sky was an inky expanse brightened by pinpoints of stars. There was a bit of a chill in the breeze, carrying the autumn scents she loved so well.
“This is my favorite time of the year,” she remarked as she made her way carefully across the gravel lot. “The start of the holidays—Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas. The beginning of the end of the campaigns. The smells, the leaves, the cooler weather that brings out comfortable clothes and comfort foods.”
With a laugh, Jake opened the pickup door for her. “I don’t believe I know anyone over the age of ten who puts Halloween in the same category as Thanksgiving and Christmas.”
“It’s a pretty cool holiday when you think about it. A time to put on a mask and for a few hours be someone else.”
“I think you put on a mask and play someone else year-round. The senator’s daughter, the senator’s aide, maybe the governor’s daughter soon.”
She turned to face him. With the truck at her back, the door to one side and Jake in front of her, she was trapped…but she didn’t mind. Like the winter clothes and the comfort foods she’d just mentioned, there was something warm and satisfying about this. “You’re wrong. This isn’t a mask. The senator’s daughter is who I am.”
“You’re Kylie Riordan, whose father happens to be a senator. There’s a hell of a lot more to you than that. When you were a little girl, did you say, ‘I want to grow up and work for my father’? ‘I want to devote my life to the things that interest him’? ‘I don’t want to fall in love and get married and have a family of my own unless it falls in with his plans’?”
“This is the life my parents planned for me from the time I was born.”
“They don’t get to make those plans. They can offer guidance and advice, but it’s your life. You’re the one who has to live it, who has to be happy with it, who has to make the decisions and take the blame for the failures and the credit for the successes. It’s your life, Kylie. Not his.”
She felt compelled to argue on her father’s behalf. “The senator would be happy for me to fall in love, get married and have children.”
“As long as the man you fall in love with is a younger version of him. As long as the children are perfect little robots willing to give up who they are to be nothing more than their father’s children and the senator’s grandchildren.”
He was dead on-target with the first part. Her exfiancé had been a younger version of the senator. The man he was pushing now was a younger, more ambitious version.
Jake was probably right about the children, as well. Though she and her father had never discussed it, he would likely expect her children to be younger versions of her. While she wasn’t really dissatisfied with her upbringing, she wanted more for any children she might bring into the world. She wanted them to run and laugh and play wildly, to climb trees and splash in t
he mud, to never worry that behaving like normal children might somehow disgrace the family name. She wanted them to live a normal life, to have dreams of their own, to pursue what made them happy.
While her parents had wanted her to pursue what made them happy. No—what made her father happy.
There was only one thing she could argue in Jake’s statement. “I’m not a robot.”
He smiled and lifted one hand from the roof of the truck. Just the tip of his index finger touched her cheek, and heat and need and the incredible urge to rub against him shot through her. Slowly he drew that fingertip to her jaw, then along her jaw to her chin. He tilted her head back so she couldn’t look anywhere but at him, his gaze dark and intense with hunger. His breathing was as shallow as her own, and his amazingly sexy lips were parted. He wanted to kiss her, needed to, almost as much as she needed him to. He leaned closer, and she tried to close her eyes but couldn’t—couldn’t break his gaze.
He cradled his palm to her cheek, his fingertips moving in a tiny, soothing caress. “You look like you’re having doubts about me kissing you.”
“Aren’t you?” she whispered, unable to take in enough air to strengthen her voice.
His smile was faint and rueful. “I could fall for you real easily.”
“But you’re not sticking around.”
“And we’re adversaries.”
“Partners,” she corrected.
“Maybe we should leave it at that. No complications.”
“No expectations.”
“No broken hearts,” he murmured and then he kissed her anyway.
It was incredible—everything a kiss should be and more. Passionate. Sweet. Demanding. Greedy. Hungry. Tender. Taking. Giving. She would have sworn that for just one instant she heard trumpets in the distance, saw starbursts brighten the dark sky. That she stopped breathing. That time stopped. That everything stopped except this one amazing, everything-and-nothing kiss.
But then the kiss ended, and she realized that the trumpets were music blaring from a nearby car, that the starbursts had merely been the car’s headlights slicing through the darkness. That she was breathing, after all, and that nothing had changed. Or everything had.
For a long, quiet moment Jake just looked at her, then he shook his head. “We’re in for it now,” he murmured, then released his hold on her and started around the truck to the driver’s side.
If by in for it he meant they’d taken a step they couldn’t turn back from, she agreed. That kiss had been too much. Her knees were wobbly as she climbed into the truck. Her fingers fumbled over the seat belt as if she’d never fastened one before. Her heart was racing, and anticipation was quivering through her. She wanted more—and she could have it…as long as she was willing to pay the price.
She smiled at her reflection in the side window as Jake pulled away from the bar. Few people knew it, but she was a wealthy woman. Everyone assumed that her mother had left the Colby fortune to her father, along with a smallish trust fund for Kylie, but in fact the opposite was true. Her father had gotten a settlement that would support him and his political ambitions all the way to the grave, and everything else had gone to Kylie. The Colby riches had stayed within the Colby family. Financially she could afford to pay anyone’s price for anything.
Emotionally…she wasn’t nearly as well prepared there.
Several miles had passed before Jake glanced her way. “What would you have done with your life if your father had been Joe Blow, insurance salesman?”
“I don’t know.”
“What is your degree in?”
“Political Science and Marketing.”
“You never really had a choice, did you?” he asked, shaking his head. “What are your interests besides politics?”
At the moment, you. Exploring this desire between them. Finding out if she could survive it.
Finding out what the senator and his friends were hiding and hoping she could survive that, too.
“I liked to draw, so when I was in college I took some art classes,” she said, thinking back to those days of stained clothes, always smelling of paint and solvents, always striving and never quite succeeding but finding satisfaction in the effort. “Not art history, though I took that, too. My father approved of that—he couldn’t have a daughter who didn’t recognize the difference between a Gauguin and a Renoir. But art classes. Sketching, painting, getting messy, opening myself up to acceptance or rejection. My instructor said I had talent.”
“But drawing nice pictures wasn’t going to help the senator’s career,” Jake said drily.
She glanced at him in the dim illumination of the dashboard. His gaze was on the road, his jaw set. “‘Pretty pictures aren’t going to get us into the governor’s mansion,’ he said. When I took the second class, he made me pay the tuition myself.”
“Call me crazy, but I think there’s a place in the world for pretty pictures. And getting messy. And having fun. And teenage rebellion, even if you are a few years past being a teenager.”
The image amused her…and enticed her. “Me? Rebel? I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“You’ve already started, darlin’.” He locked gazes with her again for a moment. “You’re with me.”
Chapter 4
“Where are you staying?” Kylie asked as one of Riverview’s three motels came into sight ahead on the left.
“At the Tepee Motor Court,” Jake replied.
“I loved that tepee when I was a kid.” Even without looking, he could hear the pleasure in her voice. “My father got a kick out of it, but my mother thought it was tacky and should be torn down.”
“Your mother was a product of her upbringing.”
She tilted her head to look at him. The streetlights they were passing lit her face briefly, then shadow again, then light. “You mean she was a snob. She was. She was spoiled and pampered from the day she was born until the day she died. She lived a privileged life. But all that privilege couldn’t stop the cancer from slowly killing her.”
“I’m sorry.” Inadequate words, Jake knew from experience, but it was all he had to offer.
She nodded, then gestured ahead. “There it is. At Christmas, they outline the tepee with red and green lights. It really is tacky then.”
He hesitated, then asked, “Do you want to go there?”
Her face was turned to the side window when she answered with a, “Yes,” so soft that he could have imagined it. Then she glanced at him. “I can’t.”
Of course not. It was too soon. They didn’t know each other well enough. This was a small town, and he was being watched by the cops. There was her father’s reputation to consider.
And knowing all that, he was still disappointed. He wanted…
Swallowing hard, he drove past the motel and covered the remaining distance to her car in a few minutes. He parked beside the Jag and turned to face her. “Thanks for dinner.”
Her smile was unsteady. “That’s supposed to be my line. After all, you paid for it.”
“And it would have been a bargain at twice the price.” Words his father used to say whenever he’d spent a little money to make him or his mother happy. “I’d kiss you again except we have an audience.”
She turned to gaze at the police car idling at the intersection. “They’re not even making an effort to hide their surveillance.”
“No. They want me to know they’re watching. They’re hoping to rattle me.”
“Looks like most of the rattling so far has been done by you, not to you.” She picked up her purse but seemed reluctant to open the door and leave.
Fair enough. He was reluctant to let her go.
“What do you have planned for tomorrow?” she asked.
He had plans, starting with tracking down the court reporter, but truth was, he wasn’t comfortable with telling her. Yeah, he’d invited her to work with him, but that didn’t change the fact that she’d never answered him that morning when he’d asked if she would report their conversa
tion to Riordan. That no matter how much he wanted her, no matter whether they worked together, they were really still on opposite sides. That her loyalty was to her father.
“That depends on what I get done this evening,” he hedged.
“This evening? It’s almost bedtime.”
He thought of her lying across a bed somewhere in that big old mansion, her hair down, her conservative dress gone…but maybe with the heels on. That image alone had the power to make him hard, and he hadn’t even gotten to what she was wearing under the dress. Sensible undergarments in white or beige? Or silk and satin and lace lingerie, creamy colors, barely there, sexy and sinful and as painful to strip off as pleasurable?
He shifted in the seat, seeking a position that offered some comfort without drawing attention to his erection. What had they been talking about? Oh, yeah, bedtime. “Only for babies. I usually don’t make it to bed before two or three in the morning. At home I do most of my writing at night.”
“So you really aren’t a morning person. Hmm. I’m at my best early in the morning.”
I can change. But he wisely kept the words in. “Well, early for me is ten o’clock.”
“Then why don’t you come by the office when you’re ready to get started?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
She opened the door and the cab light came on, illuminating them clearly for the cop down the street. “Thanks for dinner.”
“You’re welcome.” As she gracefully stepped down from the truck, he added, “Thanks for the kiss.”
She looked back with a womanly smile. “You’re welcome. Good night, Jake.”
He waited until she’d backed out of the space and driven away before he did the same. He wanted to follow her home, just to make sure she got there safely, but when he reached Main Street, he turned left toward the motel. She was a grown woman; Riverview was her kingdom. She didn’t need his protection on her own turf.
He was maybe fifty feet through the intersection of Main and Markham when red-and-blue lights flashed in his rearview mirror. The cop who’d pulled night-shift surveillance was on his bumper, light bar on. Grimacing, Jake pulled to the side of the street and shifted into park.
More Than a Hero Page 6
